One of the advents of the new era is the surge of online text based communication. Online text based communication, started with the computers and the Internet and continued to gain acceptance and popularity with Short Message Service (SMS). Email is now a de facto form of communication for both personal and business purposes and compact electronic devices are getting smaller, have more functionalities and are more integrated. The singular direction headed by mobile phones, handhelds, personal digital assistants (PDA) and pocket computers is that it must have online text based communication in one form or another, be it emails, SMS or instant messaging (IM).
As devices get smaller, one of the major challenges is to shrink the full QWERTY or QWERTY-like keyboard to a small yet still usable size, or to look at alternate forms of text input, like pen-based text input, handwriting recognition, voice recognition or keyboard alternatives. Pen-based text input is like typing with one finger on a full keyboard, necessitating Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help predict the words, handwriting recognition is relatively slow at best with a long learning cycle. Voice recognition is still in a developing stage and the voice recognition software takes a relatively long time to learn. Additionally, alternative keyboards are conventionally not preferred, and typically used mostly under special circumstances like cord keyboards for the handicapped.
Speed and efficiency wise, keyboard entry is still the fastest and most convenient for text based communication. One of the huge barriers associated with alternative keyboards is the learning curve. An even larger issue for alternative keyboard is the acceptance and how strongly the QWERTY and QWERTY-like keyboard have been favoured in the public. Many other keyboard configurations have appeared like the Dvorak keyboard. Thus, with the heavy and increasing demand for online text based communication, many device manufacturers are forced to using a miniature full-sized QWERTY keyboard. The miniature keyboard, though visually appealing, leaves much to be desired for anything more than casual text input as the keys are too small and too close together.
There have been various attempts to improve the QWERTY keyboard. Basically, there are two main schools of keyboard reduction; the QWERTY keyboard reduction methods and the methods associated with the, already reduced nine keys, numeric phone pad. Of the two, the methods associated with the numeric phone pad appear to be the most comprehensive for user's to use for the treatment of multi-character keys (keys assigned with more than one character or symbol), covering both word- or block-based predictive text input, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,818,437; 5,945,928; 5,953,541; 6,011,554; 6,286,064 and 6,307,549, and the more conventional unambiguous text input methods of multi-tap, two-stroke or multiple-stroke interpretation, like in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,011,554 and 6,307,549.
The main problems with the numeric phone pad methods are that they are neither QWERTY compatible nor are they specifically designed for rapid typing or double-typing (double-handed and/or double-thumbed). This is because the centre of the design is on the numeric phone pad and not the QWERTY or QWERTY-type keyboard.
With the QWERTY and QWERTY-type keyboards, it is believed that the increasing demands for mobile text input (being able to send text messages everywhere and on the go) will place text input on a much higher priority than numeric input, because of the intensity and extensiveness of usage. Thus, with the merging of the mobile phone and PDA functionalities, even traditional numeric-geared apparatus like the mobile phone will need a typing enabled (as similar to QWERTY typing as possible) text-input function.
Prior art QWERTY keyboard reduction methods range from chord type keyboards and ergonomic arrangement of keys, as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,017,030; 4,847,799; 4,824,268; 4,579,470; 3,945,482; 5,790,103 and U.S. patent application No. 20010006587, are either difficult to learn (chord), not QWERTY compatible, not intuitive enough for fast learning, use too many keys, do not have strong multi-character keys treatment (needs colour coding, additional control keys or are two-stroke interpretations) and/or advocate single hand typing.
Thus, there is a need for a keyboard that not only reduces the number of keys to 10 or 12, but continues to utilise a similar memory mapping as the QWERTY or QWERTY-type configuration, and allowing for double-typing (double-handed and/or double-thumbed), thus making it both fast to learn, and fast to input.